


Heroes Aren't Meant To Survive

by orphan_account



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Explosives, Gen, Guns, Minor Character Deaths, Shiro is Ted Lavander, Undiagnosed PTSD, Vietnam War AU, prisoners of war, the things they carried AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-17
Updated: 2017-02-17
Packaged: 2018-09-25 05:52:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9805466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: There were a couple screams of confusion, but most men just stood there dumbfounded.Voltron Vietnam War AU





	

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by “The Things They Carried” by Tim O'Brien. There seemed to be a severe lack of good military fiction for this fandom. Apologies if I muss any of these acronyms up. I'm Navy, not Army.
> 
> Also, I use names of the creators because I'm salty about how they ended season 2. Gotta lash out somehow.

They were all young kids really. And that included First Lieutenant Takashi Shirogane himself at the age of 25. He was strong, all muscles and angles. Exactly the kind of man you would expect to see in charge, but in a way it was more of a facade than anything. Underneath the rock-like muscles and strong jaw was a teddy bear of a man. Much to soft to be a leader.

Much to soft to be at war.

He was put in charge of a small company; though “in charge” really just meant that out of all the boys, he had the honor of repeating orders.

Still. He saw these boys—young, much too young—as his own. His boys. His family. They ribbed each other, made horrible jokes about an even more horrible situation.

Everyone knew each other. They knew Matt Holt's father was a retired Colonel and had a younger brother. A brother who was NASA bound and much too smart for the draft, but suffered the same fate as the rest of them. They knew Shirogane was Japanese-American. That he'd signed up for ROTC for the credits his softmore year at college only to end up here, in Nam, where his _Magna cum lade_ and degree in chemistry meant as much as Private Dos Santos's ability to down a pack of M &M's in a single gulp—which is to say it was interesting, but not inherently useful.

They all knew each other's families as if they were their own. And they even knew Private Ulaz's girlfriend after she'd mailed him a particularly risque photo.

They ate food from cans and bags and made jokes that somehow made the war both worse and better at the same time.

Lieutenant Shirogane was a “by the books” kind of man. Some of that came with training, but most suspected it had more to do with his strict and proud upbringing.

Yet he turned a blind eye when stressed comrades smoked premium dope to dull their strained nerves. Or when his men dropped rations to lighten their load during their endless march through the beautiful, tropical hell that is Vietnam.

After sunset they all dug their Foxholes, curled around bibles or guns or knives, and pretended they could sleep through the night.

Men chanted things fitfully in their sleep, or rustled endlessly. Shirogane did pushups. Sets of 50. His burning muscles could never calm his burning nerves.

And then he would get his orders, rouse the company, and they'd march again in the morning to burn something or blow up some objective. It was monotonous, yet their nerves were always alight.

Today some of the grunts were tossing around a ball somehow cobbled together from their trash. It'd replaced the basketball PVT Ulaz had originally gotten from a USO care package, but lost when it had been kicked into a stream. Holt sat out, sewing his newly aquired PV2 patches onto his uniform and Ulaz busied himself with writing love letters to a mysterious “Ms. Mamora.”

Shirogane had managed to find enough purchase on a couple of parallel tree branches to do pull ups on. He attempted to ease his troubled nerves and hyper-vigilance that refused to let him relax even a little.

Maybe he had heard something, maybe he'd sensed it, or maybe it was just terrible coincidence, but he'd dropped himself from the branches and turned in time to see a flash of bright light that kicked up a spray of mud and shit and—

He'd realized what had happened before his eye's had recovered from the flash. A VC Mortor round or Bouncing Betty or Toe Popper or _something_ had been detonated. There were a couple screams of confusion, but most men just stood there dumbfounded.

The shit that rained down—Shirogane had realized—was not just shit as a disembodied hand flopped to the ground hear him. The first casualty of their company. _His company_.

He'd expected to feel something like sadness or horror or anger at the death of his comrade, but even as they'd put a name to the corpse—Private Dos Santos—and plucked parts of him up to deposit into a body bag, he felt nothing but overwhelming numbness. As if he were detached from the situation. He'd still felt numbness when he turned down the joint offered to him while waiting next to the body. He felt nothing as they handed off Dos Santos to the Helo during Dustoff. And he felt nothing that night as he settled into his Foxhole to rest.

He did however, remember.

As he closed his eyes to sleep, his brain fed him pictures of Dos Santos running to catch the ball of trash. It conjured hundreds of visions of Dos Santos's face, sometimes an “O” of surprise, sometimes an image of horror—as the blast disintegrated him.

Shirogane never rested easy after that. Every time he closed his eyes he'd hear the blast or picture Dos Santos—with either an expression of terror or surprise painted across his face—before his body evaporated and rained down in a pile of shit across the Vietamese ground.

The company bitched and joked, but there was a soberness to the atmosphere. Everyone had Dos Santos at the tip of their tongues, but no one chose to acknowledge him out loud. Perhaps it was better that way, to continue making crude and sick jokes than it was to acknowledge the severity of the situation.

Either way, hardly anyone complained when Shirogane began enforcing the regulations. No one mentioned when his resolve steeled, or when he'd become more withdrawn. No one commented when the Lieutenant woke up gasping in the middle of the night or trained his toned body particularly hard.

They continued their marches, their blowing up tunnels, and burning things. They marched with heavy packs and heavy hearts through the mud and shit and despair.

And LT1 Shirogane continued to remember Dos Santos—some abstract face stretched into an “O” before a flash of light and a rain of shit.

\---

Marching became an integral part of their day. A necessary structure that kept them from wallowing in stuff-pity. Standing still put every man ill at ease. Especially now that the company waited—all but one—kicking dust outside of a VC tunnel system. Their minds running wild with worry as the man who scouted them—PV2 Holt—crawled deeper and farther away.

Would they hear him scream? If he died, would they know?

The thought buzzed at the back of everyone's mind, even Lieutenant Shirogane's, which was still replaying vivid images of Dos Santos’s face.

He heard the blast that had disintegrated Dos Santos into the gore that took the entire company—sixteen men in total—an hour to lump into a body bag. He didn't flinch this time. He heard the blast again, refusing to flinch even as PVT Ulaz's tall sturdy frame crashed into him and hauled him to the ground. Shirogane's eyes widened, the breath being squeezed from his lungs as he collided with the ground.

He became abruptly cognizant of the sounds around him. The yelling, clipping of gunfire, and the blasts that were so very alike and unlike the blast that took Dos SanSantos.

“Lieutenant! Lieutenant!” he finally heard as Ulaz shook him, holding him white-knuckled by the fabric of his reliefs.

“Shit,” Shirogane cursed, pushing himself onto his elbows and grabbing for his five pound helmet that had toppled off during his fall.

“Everyone get to cover!” he snarled over another mortar blast. He groped around for the M-14's three-point sling, unclipping it from his shoulders. He guided it to a more comfortable position as he shifted himself prone. Next to him Ulaz settled into the same, racking a bullet into the chamber of his slightly bigger M-16.

PV2 Montgomery ate a bullet. Literally. The impact shattered his teeth and jaw. Shirogane watched him drop silently like a puppet that had its strings cut.

“How many Charlies you see?” He asked Ulaz while flicking his gun from safe to semi-auto, barely resisting putting the gun into full auto. He didn't have the ammo to waste.

Shirogane took a breath, feeling the adrenaline course his system. When he saw the head of a Vietcong soldier pop up from a ditch to lob something he lined up two sights, popping his finger onto the trigger just once. He wasn't sure if his shot hit. He couldn't even distinguish it from the popcorn of gunfire. He never saw the VC soldier pop his head back up from the ditch again though.

“I don't see ‘em, that's the problem sir,” Ulaz answered shooting a few rounds, though Shirogane wasn’teven sure if he was shooting at anything in particular or just shooting because he was scared.

Scared. That was a feeling Shirogane expected to feel. He probably did feel it, if his shaking leg was any indication, but his mind pointedly ignored the sensation.

He heard the sound of yet another mortar bomb exploding, briefly causing the ghost of Dos Santos to flash into his field of vision before clearing with the debris.

“Something’s wrong,” Shirogane grunted out. “There's no way that all of this firepower is meant for just our company. This has got to be an ambush…”

As soon as the words were out of his mouth the realization hit him.

“Where's Holt? Did he make it out of the tunnel?”

Ulaz grunted scanning for the red-headed soldier.

“I'm not sure,” he shouted over the chaos.

“Find his radio and establish comms with Ops, this ambush wasn’t for us, so get us some backup.”

Ulaz grunted some reply that couldn't be heard over the fire and Shirogane shifted to a strong knee laying down cover fire for his companion. He shot a few rounds into the dirt of the ditch, forcing Vietcong soldiers to keep their heads below cover. He spared a glance to see that Ulaz had made it about five yards away and was quickly digging out the beaten green PRC-25 radio, keying it up and shouting into the mic, all comms protocol forgotten.

Shirogane fired off a few more rounds, this time seeing one of his shots clipping a VC soldier in the forehead.

“Ulaz!” he shouted. “Have you established comms?”

“Roger!” Ulaz said something else, but too much was happening at once for Shirogane to catch it.

Suddenly the mortars made sense as four Navy F-4 Phantoms thundered overhead. Shirogane's company hadn’t been the VC's target, they had.

Mortars boomed with crudely attached sights guiding them. They kicked explosive ammunition into the air. One round crashed into the ground failing it’s vertical trajectory and Shirogane's heart leapt into his throat remembering exactly what one of these rounds had done to Private Dos Santos.

He scrambled to his feet in time to see Private Holt surface from the tunnel too close to the fallen bomb. Every second stretched out endlessly, but Shirogane's boots felt like lead as he couldn't run fast enough through the dirt and debris. He shoved Private Holt into the ground as the shock of the explosion hit, pushing the vision from his eyes.

Unconsciousness was instantaneous.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More to come, but military work schedules are kinda wonky. Sorry I can't give you a time frame to expect updates.

**Author's Note:**

> I was going to do more on this, but my inspiration kind of dried up on this. Apologies.


End file.
